Well this is odd. For some reason all I want to do is …giggle. I wonder why? I don't think anything particularly funny is going on. There is a strangely pleasant tingling sensation running through my entire body which feels kinds good but I don't think it is anything that deserves laughter. Not that I could laugh even if I knew what I was wanting to laugh about. I have a suspicion that I cant move. Not that I want to move at the moment. I feel so…heavy. Like my body weighs more than usual. I am oddly aware of my own weight pressing down into the mattress under me. I wonder why I am focusing on these things so much?

Ahh, I get it. I must have been beaten up pretty good. Minion is sitting beside me, probably with that worried look on his face. I can't see him, even my eye lids don't seem to be in my control at the moment, but I know he is there. He is such a good friend, I don't think I ever really told him that enough.

This darkness is quite comforting. If I focus through the fuzziness I can feel the dull ache of what could possibly be immense pain. Minion must have dosed me up on some pain killers. I must remember to thank him for that when I can move again. He really is such a fantastic fish!

Did something explode? I can't seem to remember too clearly what hap-… oh. Oh my.

Titan.

Oh yes, that would account for the pain. I wish I hadn't remembered that now. He may have been a complete imbecile but man could he land a punch! I am lucky to be alive, I suppose. I have no idea how I managed it. I remember… I remember going for the diffuser gun in the car…then the sensation of flying. Heh, had my cape come off by then? It would have looked fantastic as I was hurtling through the air like that. How did I survive then? I remember, I had an ingenious idea, possibly one of my best. Oh, the dehydration gun! I was falling towards the fountain, so I dehydrated myself! I…dehydrated myself? I've never done that before. What happened? Did the gun dehydrate as well as I was holding it? I shall have to ask minion later…when I can move again.

Roxanne! She was there! Through all of it, I was trying to save her! Did I? Was I in time? Oh damn it, this is getting irritating, I wish I could remember clearly! Why is it I can remember so much from my past yet I can't remember what happened the last time I saw her?

What's that? Oh, it must be minion, I think he has just put something cold on my head, I must be burning up. Ah minion, he has always been there for me. He really is a fantastic fish! I should tell him that more. I will when I can move again.

Did I win? I think I won. What will Warden say? I think I'm the good guy? Oh ho I bet everyone is so surprised! I wish I could see Warden's face. It probably looked something like the time I turned his car inside out. It really was a silly idea but hey, everyone needs to have a bit of fun sometime right? The look on his face was priceless. Pure shock! It must have took two whole minutes before he regained his senses. Oh that was a fun time. I had just decided to embrace my badness after that brat from school had taken everything away.

Destiny.

That was the one thing that drove me forward for all these years. Destiny. I thought I had attained it, I beat the hero and took over the city. It took me a long time to realise why that left such a … hollow feeling inside. Hmhmmm, that night when I went to destroy the Metro Man Museum was … an eye opener to say the least. It was a stroke of luck that that man… Bernard, was still there, Roxanne would surely have discovered me if I hadn't have disguised myself as the strange little man. Oh ho, what a stroke of luck that was! Who would have thought that she was the one I needed to pull me round to a sense of purpose again!

Her idea was fantastic! To make myself a new rival, now that is some serious initiative! I never imagined what that one conversation would lead to.

Oh of course, I knew she was beautiful, I wouldn't have been kidnapping her for so long if she wasn't. When in the history of ever has a Super villain bothered to kidnap someone that was considered to be …average? Oh she was defiantly the most beautiful creature I have ever seen. The way she sat in the chair that first time, the fear clearly evident on her face, it was nearly enough to make me stop right there and then. Maybe I would have if Metro Man hadn't turned up so fast. The second time she was much more confident and it soon became a glorious game between us. I just had to find out how far she could be pushed and I longed to see a look of surprise on her face. That one never really came through. Not until I defeated Metro Man once and for all.

Oh this pain in my head, it is making it difficult to think. It all feels so …fuzzy. Hmhmmm. IT kinda feels like that feeling I had when I was with Roxanne. When I was disguised as Bernard in order to take her out on 'dates'. She was so unlike I have ever seen her before. During our kidnapping times she was always so confident and sure of herself no matter what I did to try and make her feel insecure. But on our dates, she was … almost shy. She was funny and kind and accommodating, no matter how strange I must have seemed to her as I admitted things to her that up until then only Minion had known. We talked about everything, my childhood, growing up in a school as an outcast…I had to catch myself quite frequently before I inadvertently betrayed my true identity to her.

Oh yes, I can clearly see why so many other Heroes have 'secret identities' they really do make things so much easier.

It was the best day of my life when she told me that she had never truly been Metro Man's girlfriend! It was all some kind of elaborate act to fool the press in some way. Even I must admit that their presentation was flawless. Oh yes, I was definitely pleased to hear that and just lay there on that picnic blanket in the park, looking up at the sky with a dreamy look on my face as I thought back over all of the times we had shared together in a whole new light. It was at that moment I realised I was truly falling in love with her.

Then everything fell apart. As we sat in the restaurant and I listened to her tell me of how Titan had believed he was sweeping her off her feet and deposited her on the top of Metro Tower before blasting off in anger after she rejected him, all I could think of was how utterly beautiful she looked even with her hair all dishevelled.

Then she kissed me.

It was the best thing that has ever happened to me, it was enough to make me forget about everything else in the world…and then it was all ripped away from me. Fate is a cruel mistress.

The look on her face as she saw me, the real me, sitting there in the crowded restaurant, was heartbreaking. I thought she was going to break down there and then but she took a deep breath and marched out of the room leaving me surrounded by all of the startled onlookers still staring at me in disbelief. After regaining my senses I rushed after her, uncaring of the strange man who squeaked something about a bill as I pushed past him. I was too late to see which was she went so I ran for the car in order to reach her before she got to her apartment. With this invisibility turned on I sped through the quiet streets in such a dramatic way that any onlookers would have been impressed if they had been able to see it. Then I saw her, huddled against the cold rain that soaked the beautiful purple dress she was wearing. She was jumping away from the piles of trash that were re-hydrating everywhere around her. Hmm…I had forgotten about those, really should have collected them up. Oh well.

The things she said to me when I stopped her and demanded that she speak to me… well, they hit their mark. I had everything prepared in my head, I had even rehearsed what I was going to say to her while I raced through the abandoned streets. But that look on her face, oh I wish I could say it was only anger! I would have been able to deal with the anger. But that look of… of utter betrayal… well, for the first time in my life I knew I was in a situation that I really couldn't talk myself out of.

Did she really think that all I was doing was messing with her? Playing some kind of game where I would eventually jump out and gloat over how I tricked her? That wasn't it at all! I was… Oh what was I thinking? How could I have been so foolish to think that it could ever work out? I was parading around wearing the disguise of some guy… it was then I realised that it must have been that guy that she had all those feelings for. But… she said categorically that she believed it was what the person was like on the inside.

I was such a fool! Pushing Minion away, hurting Roxanne… and then angering Titan. Why oh why did I persist with that bumbling oaf?

Oh it is all such a mess! My head … I can't seem to keep my thoughts in check. This feeling. The same that I felt that night in the rain… that helplessness is back again, I just hope that I'm not actually crying. I don't seem to have any control over my body at all at the moment. I felt the same when I went to her for help after Titan nearly killed me the first time. I never dreamed that it would end up with the to of us searching through what we thought was Metro Man's abandoned home when in reality it was nothing more than a shrine to his former job.

Oh, but having her next to me… and me as myself too, well it was more than I ever could have hoped for. We sat next to each other sharing incredulous looks with each other as we listened to Music Man reveal his cunning plot to us about how he escaped from the shackles of Herodom. A few times during his monolog I caught myself looking at the expression on her face. She was devastated, her entire world had been turned upside down by the friend that had not only betrayed her but also the entire city. Yet it wasn't even close to the look she had given me that night. In the rain she had not only looked betrayed and devastated, but also… heartbroken. No matter how badly all of this felt, how much it hurt to find out just how far the good guy had gone to make sure he left that life behind, it couldn't come close to how badly I had trample on her heart. Well, if he could just give up that way then why didn't I? After all, he was always the strong one, always the one with everyone on his side, with millions of people wishing every day to be just like Metro Man.

He reminded me of something that day. I was the Bad Guy. I was never the one who was supposed to save the city, no one wanted me to be that person after all. So, I gave in. Roxanne tried to stop me, she actually tried to talk me into fighting Titan, she even said she would help. But the feeling of defeat had never weighed so heavily on my shoulders. All I could think of was slinking away to pretend none of it was happening. That it wasn't all my fault.

So I went home.

Humph, That didn't last long. What was she thinking? Standing up to Titan on her own? Why would she do something so reckless, so stupid… so heroic? And then she was in danger. Everything had been flipped on it's head. Titan was the one kidnapping Roxanne and I was the one being summoned to her rescue. Still, some things remain comfortably the same as they always were. Minion breaking me out of jail seemed to snap me out of that… darkness I had found myself in.

Well, if Titan wanted to lure me out to save the day, then he was going to get a bit more than he bargained for.

Oh ho ho did it ever feel good to be back to my usual self again! I had been planning that little show piece for a while now, after all, coordinating that many Brainbots could not have happened in the space of a couple of hours! It had the desired effect. Titan came at 'me' in a rush of pure anger which clouded his judgement and slowed his dim-witted senses even more. The Brainbots chewing on him was a stroke of genius if I say so myself, and that must have stung more than a little. They kept to their instructions and blasted apart from one another as soon as Titan's heat ray was activated so that not many of them would be too badly injured. Lucky thing too as it took quite a lot of them to hold the falling tower building upright.

When I saw her face, so full of hope that I was going to be there to save her, my heart sang. From my vantage point hidden amongst the city's buildings I could see everything unfold on the transmission sent by the Brainbots.

It was a risky plan and it paid off…for the most part. The saw blade worked a treat to cut that blasted bus in half as that idiot Titan kicked it towards Roxanne. It took all the showmanship and restraint I had to not leap on him that instant and try to rip him apart with my bare hands for what he was trying to do to her. The anger that was swelling up in me, I hadn't felt that since I was a teenager.

It was easier that I thought it would have been to fool Titan into thinking I was Metro Man and I actually enjoyed it. Playing the part of Metro Man was easy, I has seen how he interacted with me sooo many times that his speeches were catalogued inside my head! Too bad the illusion didn't last long. After Titan had flown off and I had descended down to Roxanne, she deactivated my disguise much to the shock and horror of the surrounding crowd but the smile she gave me…oh it was like the sun had come up for the very first time! It was like… she was finally seeing the me she had been looking for, like I was suddenly some different person and it was exactly who she wanted to see. Her smile was so beautiful I probably had some dopey grin on my face as well.

Then…the world stopped again.

Titan had seen through my cunning plan and had returned even more infuriated than ever. Yeah, that is why I'm so damn sore now! He nearly killed me didn't he? He was actually trying to kill me! He came close to it too. Then in the middle of it all, she was there, telling me that she had indeed looked back that night in the rain, that she actually cared! And the car! Oh that beautiful, infuriating invisible car was parked right there! Right there! Titan obligingly smashed his fist into my chest hurling me back towards the car, which unfortunately resulted in many broken ribs from the feel of things. Things kind of got blurry then.

What happened after? Oh, ow! Hmm… why is the fuzziness creeping in again? I can feel myself slipping away. Am I dying? Oh I hope not. Not before I remember…what happened…after.

After I… I rehydrated in the fountain. Hmm, I remember smirking up at the startled 'anti-hero' and…and what? Did I defuse him? I must have, I think I remember him lying in a crumpled heap on the floor and me saying something about bad guys always loosing. Heh, had I got o use that line on him. Oh I hope I said it right.

Then…then what?

Roxanne! She was there. She…hugged me! She actually hugged me, and she knew it was me too! She clung on to me just as hard as I was clinging to her…oh god I hope I said something smart…I can't remember. All I remember is feeling so happy that she was ok, and that she was smiling. She was with me and she was…she was smiling.

She was smiling

…